Observations on politics, news, culture and humor

The Chinese Communists, in their own words

When I first subscribed to the RSS for the People’s Daily, the official organ of the Chinese Communist Party, I was hoping for loony propaganda galore. Instead, it’s been mostly boring stories about Chinese leaders meeting foreign leaders. That is, until today, when this article showed up in my reader: “Philosophical revelations of the Chinese path.”Buckle up for the cognitive dissonance tour:

Reviewing and summarizing China’s development path in a philosophical manner may conclude many revelations, which may help the Chinese continue to explore and advance in a new historical stage.

The first revelation is the unity of social and human development. Human development should be the ultimate goal of social development and it can only be achieved through promoting social development.

I’ll be fair–they are only talking about post-1979 market-era China, so I’ll leave out the 20-70 million peacetime deaths that occurred under Mao. Even since then, there’s been great opportunities for social development like the repugnantly collectivist one-child policy, ongoing censorship, horrific pollution and a restricted internet. As for human development, you could sample from things like Tiananmen Square, the imprisonment of dissidents, crackdowns in Tibet and Xinjiang and the world’s highest number of executions per year. Assuredly, there has been a great unity of social and human development…in the wrong direction.

How about one more?

The third revelation is to adhere to the principles of liberating thoughts, seeking truth from facts and changing with the times during the course of practice. To achieve the two unities (the unity of social and human development and the unity of valuing objective laws and giving play to subjective initiatives), high importance should be attached to practice while giving play to subjective initiatives.

Ok, I can see the Deng Xiaoping quote about the color of the cat not mattering so long as it catches rats written all over this point. But how can you seek truth from facts when you claim that Han Chinese immigrants in Xinjiang are mostly bilingual? How can you seek truth from facts when you do a piece about the year anniversary of the Xinjiang riots and only talk about tragedies experienced by Han? How can you seek truth from facts when you claim to be respecting Tibetan culture even as you kidnap the Panchen Lama and elect your own puppet?

China’s Communist Party opted for market economics long ago and left some of the worst of their ideology behind. It’s a shame their anti-humanistic authoritarianism is as strong as ever.

BONUS: Check out this “They really look like (sic)!” slideshow that caught my eye on the side of the article. Yes, a major Chinese newspaper did just compare the face of an albino gorilla to that of an albino Afro-Briton. Gee, guys…thanks for missing the last century of progress.